This is one way of awakening parents like me to what our responsibilities are. Kids should be disciplined and guided at a young age and even until they reach college. With guidance and teaching of right conduct and manners, kids will grow up as an asset to the community and not as a liability.

The focus should be on education...providing better education to our children..this includes teachers and parents showing good examples to young kids and teaching them right values. If at a young age they can distinguish bad from good, then they'll most likely less to no crimes will be committed by these kids.

A 16-year-old Stow-Munroe Falls High School student is being charged with telecommunications harassment after taking a photo of a girl performing a sexual act with him and putting it on Twitter, according to a Stow police report.

The act happened on Jan. 28 in a high school stairway, the report stated. The boy is 16 and the girl is either 14 or 15 years old, police said.

Using his phone, the boy snapped a picture of the girl while she was performing the act and first sent it to three friends, the report stated. The boy later posted the photo on Twitter and then took it down. By that time, the photo had started circulating in the school, the report stated.

The kid was cited by Stow police.
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The incident took place on school grounds, so he might be suspended.
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Our bloggers and some here think the world is such a nice place and no kid should be locked up.
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If I had his Twitter name, we could post on our account from here and also check out some parent's 14 year old girl.
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BTW.. how does a 15 year old get a cell phone and a Twitter account?
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LOPI. Lack Of Parental Involvement.
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NPWFTL
Regards

Most cell phone companies offer family plans so it's not that unusual for a 15 year old to have a cell phone. And you're practically the only person in America over 15 who doesn't have a Facebook or Twitter account.

My parents made us kids pay for our own phones.
The same goes for us kids with our kids.
Now you know why I call Generation Xcess and Generation Yner the "Entitlement Generations."
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I know quiet a many person who don't have a social moron account.
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But the VA Tech mass murderer had a social moron account, so did...
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Many people don't want to give up their personal infromation to the gov't or other institutions, but they put all sorts of embarassing information on the social moron sites.
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Like I pointed out, lack of parental involvement.
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NPWFTL
Regards

Fully 65% of young offenders incarcerated in one of the state’s long-term facilities, and 53% of convicted juveniles not sent to a long-term state-run facility, commit another crime within the next three years.
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That's their choice.
They choose to commit another crime.
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No matter how much money you throw at it, nothing will change.
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NPWFTL
Regards

Yes and no. People, especially children, are molded by their environment. If the environment you are in is full of other kids who commit crimes, then that is what you absorb. If you never get sent into that environment, you end up without those "role models" and become a different person.
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Sure, money alone won't change things. But spending money on a different approach to dealing with kids who need sensible adults around more than anything else? That has at least the potential to change quite a bit. The implementation won't be trivial. But trying it isn't a crazy idea either.

Except that, as noted explicitly in the article, different punishment and treatment schemes reduce recidivism rates by up to 80%; at the same time, education and treatment are significantly cheaper (as also noted in the article) than incarceration.

Its good to hear a proposal that is sophisticated, thoughtful and non-violent coming out of the USA. That is comes from Republicans in Georgia is perhaps the most astonishing piece of news so far this year.

As Churchill said...you can rely on Americans to do the right thing....after they have tried every other option. Do something (sometimes ideological but sometimes just anything) before considering what the right thing to do is....has for too long been the mantra of those people.

You can say [write] that again! However, without wishing to appear to be too negative, there may be a downside to the new "reform school" being a "military academy." Not too long ago, young offenders were sometimes offered military service as an alternative to prison. How well did that work out?

Boarding schools "with discipline" have a track record that is not entirely positive, especially in the UK [or so I've heard]. If such schools and military academies are to be adopted as "The Solution" then they must be carefully regulated and supervised.

Has ALEC found out about this? They won't be happy that Republicans (REPUBLICANS!!!!!) are not doing the bidding of their corporate overlords. ALEC, or American Legislative Exchange Council, is a sort of matchmaking service for businesses who want to bribe state legislators to get friendly bills passed and state legislators who need bribes, er, "campaign contributions" in exchange for legislative favors. They're responsible for a lot of "tough on crime" legislation that fills private prison beds.
.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALEC

Good for Georgia. Here's hoping the new approach spreads. (And that nobody asks Obama about it in public. Because he would probably say something positive about it, and that would kill it off before it got rolling nationwide.)

So it took fresh dollars-and-cents Republicans to clean up the mess left behind by Georgia's older slower Democrats. Like Michael cleaning up after Fredo.
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Democrats: "I can handle things. I'm smart. Not like everybody says, like dumb. I'm smart and I want respect!"
Republicans: "Let's go fishing."

RR, You do understand that the policies leading to our massive incarceration problem were largely promoted, designed and implemented by Republicans. I mean, stiff drug laws, harsh mandatory minimum sentences, anti-recidivist legislation--these policies, and movement of the political center on these issues, has been driven by Republican 'tough on crime' rhetoric.

The reason it's news is that Republicans in Georgia (as well as all democrats)are liberalizing their criminal justice policies.

This is so mind-numbingly obvious. The case, though, is particularly bad in California, where our prisons are "cruel and unusual punishment" they're so overcrowded, the guards are so overpaid they get hundreds of applicants for each opening, and the union is so strong you can't even remove them when they get caught smuggling drugs. Of course, Georgia is a right to work state, so it doesn't channel tax dollars to unions to campaign to lock up its citizens. So a red state can get this done, and the blue one can't, figures.

California may back into it. the prisons are so overcrowded, and the budget in such bad shape, that we may see adults who are in for minor (usually drug-related) offenses getting clemency en masse. Just to get the numbers down to where we can afford to house them in conditions which don't result in Federal judges slapping the state with fines that we can't afford either.
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Not that it wouldn't be better to take Georgia's approach. I wonder if lifting the text of the Georgia law word for word would be enough to get California Republicans to support it? (Nah, probably not. "Soft on crime" would get rolled out big-time.) And if California Democrats could be convinced that it makes sense to save the money for things that they care about.... One can only hope and pray.

Sadly I can't be optimistic in this case. When we received our federal mandate to reduce our prison population, both Democrats and Republicans were arguing that this would just release murderers into the streets. I don't think they have the honesty to admit that some people in our prisons don't really belong there, much less the will to let them go.
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I'm hopeful that one day we can get past using jail as a catch-all for society's troubles, but not before we drag ourselves through hell in the process.

But I like how republican leaning types are all gushy about the laws passed. That party put tough on crime laws on the books, and drowned the prison system with bodies and bloated the guard population to go with it. The right's version of buying votes; make everyone a cop or a prison guard. If dems did it, the howling would be endless. Never the less, the legal changes are welcome.

Funny how it didn't occur to them that more crimes meant more prisons which meant more prison guards . . . whose union was unlikely to support Republicans on anything except more prisons. Public sector unions not supporting Republicans! What a shocking discovery!

Jerry Moonbeam is a cheap sunnavabitch, he might push it.
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I so wish that was true. Look, a lot of the ramp up started with Nixon, a republican but I do you remember you enthusing over him.
-If dems did it, the howling would be endless.
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Seriously. That is the democratic party. Money supposedly sent to schools winds up going right from the union to the DNC.

Actually, I don't see any way (short of the kind of massive make-over that doesn't seem to be in the cards) that the Republicans get a blocking minority anywhere (let alone a state-wide office). Not in two years. Not really even in 10.
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Sure, there are more swing districts since redistricting. But those are places where a moderate conservative could win. The Republicans here have moved so far right that the chances of someone who could win in those districts making it thru the primaries is small. One or two will probably sneak thru. But to do so, they will have to be willing enough to compromise occasionally that the "blocking minority" will still not be reliable.

No, never been enthusiastic. More like respect for the cagey, warped sunnabitch. If alive, I'd leave him at arms length, but over the existing crop of politicians, I'd take him in a New York second.

I'll take the smart crook over dumb crooks or dumb niceguys.

All that has been noticed is that politicians are uniform, regardless of political affiliation. Welcome to how things work. ;)

The sort of thing done in Georgia is typically dolled up as weepy liberalism by fire breathing republicans. By drastically reducing the prison population, the save themselves the boat anchor of pensions down the road.

Nixon did start it up, in reaction to the crime wave. Over time it became marketing driven v solution driven. That's politics in the US.

I think that depends a lot on how the Democrats use this session. This is the first time since I moved here that Republicans couldn't block budget and revenue bills and they carried a lot of districts with Republican advantages. They also had some incumbency advantages they won't have in 2 or 4 years. Just as an example local to where I am sitting, Fran Pavley is a very good, very likable, fairly moderate Democrat who won re-election in a newly drawn Republican district against someone who seemed me like a very good, very likable, fairly moderate Republican. Pavley terms out in 4 years and I wouldn't bet on a different Democrat keeping that seat, particularly if Todd Zink runs again. If I'm not mistaken, that one switch, all else equal, gives Republicans in the state Senate blocking power on any revenue bill.

Possibly. But that depends on whether the relatively moderate Republicans who get elected are willing to conform to the overall party strategy or not. If they know that going extreme will lose them re-election, they might decline to reflexively block everything. Guess we'll have to wait and see.

Well, that's what I think happened in November. The only Republicans left in the state house are either from brick-red districts or people who want to get work done. But the safe GOP districts are getting pretty hispanic so this is another place I think the GOP will either turn into David Dreiers or Brontosauri.

Hmm. What if the privately-run-prison ran as follows:
- The prison is paid, per prisoner, 80% of the reasonable cost of holding him.
- The prison gets a further 40% (total: 120%) as an option, paid out over the four years after his release -- but only if he stays out of trouble.

That would line up the private interest (getting paid) with the public interest (no crime).

Real Conservatives can learn from foolish mistakes. It's the Yahoos, the Right-wing radicals, who refuse to let reality interfere.
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I hope the GOP stuffs them back into their holes, where the extreme cranks of the Left and of the Right belong.

Grover Norquist is a universally recognised crank (except by other cranks). He is viewed with contempt by most including TE and rightly so - he is blackmailing democratically elected representatives to do things that no sane person would elect them to do.

"I hope the GOP stuffs them back into their holes, where the extreme cranks of the Left and of the Right belong"

What about the extreme cranks in the middle. And there are plenty of them. They need to be stuffed back into their holes as well I suppose, why not?

I'm talking about the dogmatic fence-sitters and expedient flip-floppers. The two faced Janus's. The malevolent but selfish do-gooders. The educated, sophisticated and sanctimonious 'middle of the roaders' and 'I know better than you's.